Help Child Build Healthy Eating Habits

We often get questions about how to help children change their eating habits - they are eating too much junk food and won’t eat anything healthy. There are definitely ways to work on changing a child’s eating habits to be more healthy. Of course, this is a lot more work than starting your child on a healthy lifestyle from an early age. Rather than waiting until you need to change their habits, start them eating healthy from the start.

Eating healthy does not have to be hard, but it may take a bit more work. You may have to cook a bit more often at home, but that doesn’t mean you have to cook every night. Prepare a large batch of meals every few days and simply use those for eating. Keep your meals basic if you don’t have a bunch of time to cook. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with pasta and chicken with a little bit of sauce added on it. Throw in a frozen vegetable and you’ve got a simple and tasty meal.

Teach children to drink water and milk rather than juice and soda. Juice has very little nutritional value for kids - it’s usually loaded with sugar, and doesn’t really add much. Rather than giving them juice, give them whole fruits and water. Water is great for filling their need to drink, and a piece of fruit will not have added sugars beyond what’s naturally in it already - they’ll get the nutritional value without the added sweetness.

Try to avoid a lot of sweets throughout the day - candy is really tasty, but there’s no real value in it. Once again, use fruits for desserts if needed. While candy on occasion isn’t the end of the world, having it every day often leads to kids wanting it more often. Kids love things like yogurt with fruit in it, or simply a cut up apple in the microwave with a little bit of cinnamon added on top. Bananas are also quite sweet, and often a great thing to add to a meal.

Fast food is another area to avoid - a trip to your favorite fast food place should be a treat, not a regular occurrence. Our oldest son didn’t even know what McDonalds was until his grandparents took him there when he was 5 years old. We limit our fast food meals to once a month - we still order from restaurants, but we skip places that simply serve chicken nuggets and french fries as their main course for kids.

If doing snacks at home, feed them healthy snacks. This means that you skip things like muffins and other foods that are just loaded with extra sugar. Focus on fruits and vegetables as your snacks for kids. Our go to is usually carrots and grapes - our kids like both of these quite a bit and will eat plenty of them. If your child prefers other fruits and vegetables, then go with those - give them a choice of healthy options.

Skip other junk food as well. Foods like chips and cookies have no real nutritional value usually - they also taste really good, but getting into these eating habits is generally hard to get out of. We like to use popcorn as our go to item for snacks when seeking something savory. Pop it plain and then add a little bit of popcorn seasoning on top. This will be far more filling for the calorie content involved.

Making healthy choices at home becomes easier if you start early on with your life. That doesn’t mean you never enjoy a piece of candy or pizza, it simply means those are foods you rarely eat rather than on a regular basis.